History buffs: How aerial photographs tracked down Hitler's flying bombs

[Numo]

Cool 6 minute video on the BBC web site:

At the height of WWII, as deadly German V1 and V2 rockets were fired from northern France towards the UK, a country house by the banks of the River Thames became the centre of Allied attempts to discover the Nazis' test and launch sites.

Hundreds of staff at RAF Medmenham in Buckinghamshire studied millions of grainy aerial images of northern Europe to try to find the final pieces of an intelligence jigsaw - known as Operation Crossbow.

To mark 50 years since the first batches of WWII aerial photos were declassified, Allan Williams - from the National Collection of Aerial Photography in Edinburgh - has written a book about Operation Crossbow and the role photographic intelligence played to stop the doodlebugs and V2 rockets.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23270332

[Z]

Cool stuff - thanks for the link.

[haikuman]

he called me l@@king for his GF

[SDGuy]

Putting on a Millennial thinking cap:
"pfft...what's the big deal - I could do that with Google Maps - I'm so great, I should get a trophy and promotion for that"

[haikuman]

Do not show this post to Eustace> He may have had dinner with the furor or knows some one that did.

:jest:

[eustacetilley]

haikuman wrote:
Do not show this post to Eustace> He may have had dinner with the furor or knows some one that did.

:jest:

Nah, that wasn't me; that was cbelt3...

Our family on both sides had quite enough of war after 1916, so they, and much of the rest of their country, rode "The Emergency" out.
That isn't to say that they weren't effected; take the story of my Father's strawberry patch.
He was in his teens, and money, not to say food, was difficult to come by. So my father grew strawberries on a little vacant plot of land. Gasoline also being very difficult to acquire, older modes of transportation were resorted to; my Father had no shortage of fertilizer.
One day, out of the blue, or rather the gray, a bomb fell on my Father's strawberries. My Father, naturally, blamed the Germans, but there was always some doubt...
This story circulated, and got embellished, until my Father could do a full Captain Queeg on the subject. But family legends do have a tendency to have a core of truth:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_...rld_War_II

Since Sandycove was quite a short distance from where my Father lived, I can tentatively pin down December 20, 1940, as the day the Germans bombed the hell out of my Father's strawberries.

Eustace

[ka jowct]

I knew the furor when he was just a little hissy fit.

[cbelt3]

Very cool. And no, most of my image work was from the ground towards the sky/ space. And. Few the other way.

Rudie, images show you left the kettle on ... :My_custom_Emoticon: